Custom Critical Thinking Class Essay

Fear of death lives in each person, regardless of gender, age, race or other differences. It either sleeps inside people or rests on the surface, and sometimes takes shape of paranoia. Therefore, it is not surprising that the dissenting public is punished by the greatest fear: by death. Throughout all history, mankind invented the great number of methods of killing people, such as gas chambers, injections, the jump, etc. Is the death penalty the real justice and does it save the society from the filth? Does it heal the wounds of relatives and friends of victims? Does it heal the society as a whole? Do we observe the decrease of murders and violence? All these questions are to be answered in this paper.

Capital punishment is a controversial subject, and it causes a heated discussion for the long time. Frequently, the opinions on this matter are divided into not even two, but three sides. There are people who support the death penalty, who are totally against it, and those who do not have the certain answer. The arguments of all sides are peculiar, and mostly they are quite convincing. People who crave for the capital punishment mostly have conservative views; they are following the concept of "an eye for an eye." There are also people who know the pain of losing a loved one through violence. It is difficult to say and think about forgiveness, if one’s dear person was taken away by another, and the one desire is revenge and hatred. It is difficult to imagine the full range of emotions of parents who lost their child, or of the child left as an orphan. Sometimes human cruelty is absolute and contradicts person’s own nature and life itself. Some cases boggle the mind and, at the end, the thought about death as the capital punishment is creeping in it.

However, is it right to take the life of another human being? Killing showed as being inhumane is controversial from a moral point of view. The scariest thing in the capital punishment is killing the innocent. How many wrongly convicted people are sitting in a jail right now and what is the real number of those who were executed innocent? No one knows for sure. Since 1972, seventy eight innocent people have been released from death row, but how many have died? Along with these data, it is clear that the judicial system is not transparent and true justice is largely a myth.

For example, one can examine two examples of murder case. One of them struck Texas where John William King was sentenced to death. He was guilty of the murder of James Byrd Jr. King tied the victim to his pickup truck and dragged until the victim’s head and his right arm were not separated from the body. The murderer was an absolute racist, and he totally believed in his highest mission. It did not take long for the jurors to bring in a verdict and in an hour and a half King was sentenced to death. In general, it is clear that King is an absolute evil and society paid him back in his own coin. Let one compare it with another murder case that happened in Georgia.

The attorney William Lumpkin beat to death the real estate agent Stan White with a sandbag and drowned his body in the Savannah River. He committed the crime because White was going to evict Lumpkin from his home. This murder is as terrible as the previous one, but it did not cause such indignation. Thanking to his connections and money, William Lumpkin was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was a respected lawyer and he descended from the Georgia gentry, opposed to the King, who was a total outcast.

To face the truth, one can see that inequality is still the norm of society, despite the loyalty and open-minded trends of the 21st century. People all understand that in the USA, the life of the Latino or African-American costs less than the one of a white man. Most of people sentenced to death belong to these racial groups. Racism and social inequality remain in the same place, but in a more disguised form. In the prism of two cases, the inequality can be seen quite clearly. One can think logically, if respectable Lumpkin were in the place of King, maybe the jurors would think longer and the sentence would have been softer. Let one think whether the all murderers are caught? There are the cases when nobody wants to dig in and mostly the convicted are ill, illiterate or marginal.

One can take the whole justice system, all cases of brutal murders and violence and examine them in the same way. So, one can see that the death penalty goes only to those who could not buy off or whose roots are not so noble. This is frightening, because justice itself turns into its actual absence. Is society prepared to accept such truth and be responsible for every innocent victim? Are people ready to be in the position of the killer and come before the court invented by ourselves?

Capital punishment supposed to have an absolute objectivity and responsibility. Society does not have the justice within itself, and mostly under its mask there is only vengeance and blood lust. Believing in the high mission of revenge, people become the same absolute evil as John William King.